Advocacy

CancerActionNow.org... Advocates for cancer treatments that work

Cancer ActionNow.org helps cancer patients identify treatment options to consider if standard treatment for
their cancer does not help them.

The Marti Nelson Cancer Foundation/CancerActionNow.org collaborates with other organizations to speed availability of effective and safe cancer
treatments. Check the links under "Advocacy" in the menu to the left to see what we’re doing.

Important News

Visit the Cancer Action Now! Blog

Visit our blog (linked in the sidebar menu to the left)for the latest alerts and updates.
We will sometimes post a headline on this page whenever something important comes to our attention, but our discussion and
expanded information will be posted on the blog.

Expanded Access Rules - 08-12-2009

Information Project

We appreciate the generous financial support from several individual contributors and from Bosom Buddies of Solano County,
Genentech, and Genomic Health, which enabled us to redesign, rebuild and expand CancerActionNow.org.
Our ongoing effort, supported primarily by individual contributions, is to make this site a significant resource for patients, medical professionals,
and regulatory agencies for information
dealing with all aspects of cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
From time to time we will also highlight some of the public policy issues that
may affect cancer patients and their families.

We welcome your input and suggestions for ways we can make this site more useful to our visitors. Whether you are a patient or family member, a medical care provider, a patient advocacy activist, or involved in insurance or regulatory issues, we invite you to email us at: editor (at) canceractionnow (dot) org.

Legislation and Regulatory Issues

From time to time, we will add current information on regulatory and legislative developments concerning various
aspects of cancer research and treatment. We monitor many of the political initiatives that may enhance or hinder access to effective medicine,
and we will share our thoughts with you here.

Inadequate control of cancer pain is a long-standing problem for many patients, but for a very large percentage of people with cancer, there are effective pharmaceuticals for controlling pain and improving the quality of life. Unfortunately, in the past many physicians have
been reluctant to prescribe adequate amounts of pain medication out of fear for government oversight
and regulation of their medical practice. An initiative by the families of victims of drug abuse
is making the situation much worse for many cancer patients. Although we sympathize with the people harmed by drug abuse,
we took a public position in opposition to additional regulation of the use of opioid drugs via the mechanism known as REMS
(Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies). You can see the FDA's announcement of a public meeting on the topic here:
Federal Register Notice -- FDA Proposal on
Opioids REMS, and our public comments here: MNCF
Comments on FDA Opioids REMS Proposal. This is likely to be an ongoing issue as physicians and regulators attempt to strike the
best balance between providing critically-needed care with pain drugs that work well for many patients
and preventing avoidable harm from improper use or abuse of these medicines.

Read a thoughtful proposal endorsed by the Marti Nelson Cancer Foundation regarding how Comparative Effectiveness Research can be conducted to benefit cancer patients. You can read or download the PDF at this link to the Friends of Cancer Research website.